They was bad people, I just didn’t know it. I don’t know if they was filming me naked or what but the fortune telling lady was right; they was bad people.
I was probably about 27 at that time. Me and my husband had split up, so I had left. Below us down the hill about 3 or 4 miles was a family living in a place named Byers and the people that were there was carnies. They was actually my son’s father’s “girlfriend-and-had-a-kid-by” sister. My son is Mark, his dad is Devin, he went with this girl named Abra, and it’s her sister that was living down there in Byers and her husband and her four kids – Aaron (husband) and Autumn (wife). They had four kids, they range from about 8 or 9 to 13 or so. The girls were probably 12 and 13, and the boys were probably 9 and 10. And they were already working the carnivals. At the time when I went to live down there they was talking about going out again. It was a time of year for carnivals to start in. So they was talking about going to meet Abra who was already working in the carnivals. Abra already worked in the carnivals and would come back in the cold season. When it warms up she would go back on the road. Maybe from May until September.
Originally I moved in with them because they were on the road at the time and so I offered to take care of their house and watch over their house while they were working carnivals. They had two dogs and I took care of them. The dogs kinda run the neighborhood. “Dainty” was the female dog and I can’t remember the name of the male dog. She was a great big dog and she wasn’t “Dainty” at all! I’d stayed there for a while just for somewhere to live but I wasn’t making any money. They came back every so often to rest and regroup and then decided to go back on the road again. Abra had her own game that she brought with her and would set it up at any fair. At the time she was going with one of the guys in the fair so she got Aaron and Autumn work based on her connections. This had started years back, because Abra’s mom did the same thing – she was a carney.
They came back from the road and ask if I would want to go on the road with them and watch their kids while they did the work. So I ended up being the babysitter. Abra had two kids, and Autumn and Aaron had four kids and they were wanting someone to watch them. So I was cooking and cleaning and babysitting at carnivals all over the Northeast and Midwest. One of Abra’s kids was just a baby and the other one was walking, so maybe he was four over five. Evette and Bubba! (Yes, Bubba!) Evette is getting ready to turn 18 now – time really flies. We would go from Carnival to Carnival. They had a van, and a camper van, a car and a minivan so there was four vehicles and we were like a small little caravan. I think as I recall we were going to different companies so the carnivals were unrelated. So Abra had a route set up based on where the carnivals were playing and each carnival had a route set up based on its yearly rounds, so Abra would go to all these different carnivals. She owned and set up one of the games, I’m not for sure which one, where people would come and pay money. It was a duck game of some kind with little rubber ducks. I never played the game, I was always with the kids and cooking, and cleaning, and trying to have fun. Every day was a different time at different carnivals.
They paid me, but mostly I worked for room and board and I don’t remember getting very much money out of it, to tell you the truth. They got paid, and then they made sure that we all got food and our basic needs were taking care of. We would go where all the other Carnies were camping, usually the nearest campground or sometimes where the carnivals were at there was a campground right next to them. I remember doing the dishes in tubs of cold water. We had to use the campground bathrooms. It was all like campground camping, and then you would drive or walk over to where the carnival was. I stayed in the campground with the kids most of the time. Sometimes we would walk to the carnival and walk over and see the animals and go to the barns and stuff, or look at the pictures and the art scenes and all the other displays. Some of us slept in the camper and some of us stayed in tents and some slept in the minivan. It was quite a campout. Mostly I did babysitting. You would have other carnies at the campsite too because they were all doing the same thing. I kind of stayed away from them because I was taking care of the kids. Autumn kinda wanted that, so she let them know that the babysitter was off-limits. She made sure and made that impression. She told one of the Carney guys one night that she’d cut off his balls and put them in the jar he was drinking out of if she caught him have an anything to do with me. She spoke carney language pretty well. She didn’t want any of them around the kids. And in order to get to me they would have to get around the kids. I didn’t care because I wasn’t interested at the time. I had just gone through a breakup.
Next week: the fortuneteller